2024 Race: Boone Gran Fondo

Year 2 of doing the Suarez Gran Fondo National Race in Boone. In 2023 I was prepping for IM WC in Nice, so I decided to use this race as some climbing prep and pretty much treated it like a 100 mile ride on my TT bike, versus a gran fondo of racing the timed segments. This year, I used my gravel bike, put on my TT bike wheels and raced it a little more traditionally. Overall, it such a beautiful Course (lots of it is on the Blueridge Parkway) and some fun climbing in the NC mountains.

Race wise it went reasonably well with 10th in my category.

Pyrite

I was convinced an easy way to spot something unnatural, in a natural earth like setting was to simply look for straight lines and perfectly right angles …. until I came across Pyrite.

I will need to find a new way to convince myself that humans are alien.

Goodbye Evernote, Hello Obsidian …

Finally making the move of my “2nd brain” (notes) out of Evernote and into Obsidian … I think I will miss a few features of Evernote such as the rich editor, nice formatting of tables and the polished Desktop, Web and Mobile apps, but I am over the high expense and glad to be hosting/owning/having control over my own data.

Obsidian looks very promising at the moment, a couple of work colleagues swear by it and just by the quality and sheer number of great community plugins alone has made it worth switching. Time will tell 🙂 During this move I have also modified my note collection structure, migrating to a partial implementation of Johnny.Decimal where it makes sense. Below is a screenshot of my current folder structure. I hope I can maintain this … but also know these systems require time to evolve and adapt. read more